Designed for all teachers involved in adult numeracy instruction, this blended course, will help participants explore ideas in proportional reasoning and create questions and activities that push students towards deeper conceptual understanding.

Making Sense of Proportional Reasoning is a hybrid course made up of two 4-hour face-to-face sessions
and two week-long online sessions. Each
online session takes about 4 hours to complete. Total completion time is
approximately 16 hours. Participation in
the online sessions involves reading assigned materials and participating in
online discussions and activities.

Math encompasses language and gives learners the skills and confidence they need to succeed in the workforce and higher education. This is the first of a series of courses designed for ESOL teachers who would like to deepen their understanding of math and learn how to integrate math and numeracy skills in their ESOL classrooms. Lessons provide conceptual understanding of math topics around whole numbers, including cultural differences in procedures and notation, and offer strategies for making math accessible for all levels of ESOL learners.

A headline reads, “Two out of three Americans owned a smartphone in 2015.” Does that mean two out of every group of three Americans? Is it possible to have a group of Americans who all own smartphones? Adults encounter ratios and proportions all the time in news or media statistics, estimates of risk, shopping for the best deal, creating mixtures and recipes, and countless other daily activities. The ability to reason about these numerical relationships develops over a long period of time and through deliberate exploration of the mathematics involved. Language teachers can provide opportunities for students to encounter and expand their ability to reason with ratios in real life contexts.

Mathematizing ESOL III: Integrating Ratio Reasoning is a course for English language teachers who want to deepen their own conceptual understanding of ratios and proportions and to learn strategies for helping students build ratio reasoning skills. This course is for participants who have successfully completed Mathematizing ESOL I and Mathematizing ESOL II. MESOL III is a 6 week, asynchronous, facilitated online course with an additional final project for Massachusetts participants who wish to earn Professional Development Points (PDPs).

Estimated time to complete course: 18 hours, depending on your pace and style of learning

The Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) for the Massachusetts SABES Center for Education and Career Planning (CECP). The statewide VCoP provides Massachusetts practitioners a forum to discuss topics of mutual concern and share ideas, resources, and strategies related to education and career planning, advising, and adult career pathway program design and implementation.

The Mathematizing ESOL 2: Percentages and Decimals course builds upon and extends conceptual understanding of math topics and how they can be integrated into ESOL instruction. In the prerequisite to this course, Mathematizing ESOL 1, the focus is on math notation and operations with whole numbers. In this course, we extend that knowledge to include other rational numbers, with an emphasis on percentages and decimals. We will explore these concepts before looking at real life applications of these math skills and strategies to contextualize them in the ESOL classroom.